The foregoing letter, as it appeared in the _Standard_, brought forth the following leading article upon the subject the following day, August 15th, in which the writer says:—“We yesterday published a letter from Mr. George Smith, whose efforts to ameliorate and humanise the floating and transitory population of our canals and navigable rivers have already borne good fruit, in which he calls attention to the deserted and almost hopeless lot of English Gipsy children. Moses Holland—the Hollands are a Gipsy family almost as old as the Lees or the Stanleys, and a Holland always holds high rank among the ‘Romany’ folk—assures Mr. Smith that in ten of the Midland counties he knows some two hundred and fifty families of Gipsies, and that none of their children can read or write. Bazena Clayton, an old lady of caste, almost equal to that of a Lee or a Holland, confirms the story. She has lived in tents all her life. She was born in a tent, married from a tent, has brought up a family of sixteen children, more or less, under the same friendly shelter, and expects to breathe her last in a tent. That she can neither read nor write goes without saying; although doubtless she knows well enough how to ‘kair her patteran,’ or to make that strange cross in the dust which a true Gipsy alway leaves behind him at his last place of sojourn, as a mark for those of his tribe who may come upon his track. ‘Patteran,’ it may be remarked, is an almost pure Sanscrit word cognate with our own ‘path;’ and the least philological raking among the chaff of the Gipsy dialect will show their secret _argot_ to be, as Mr. Leland calls it, ‘a curious old tongue, not merely allied to Sanscrit, but perhaps in point of age an elder though vagabond sister or cousin of that ancient language.’ No Sanscrit or even Greek scholar can fail to be struck by the fact that, in the Gipsy tongue, a road is a ‘drum,’ to see is to ‘dicker,’ to get or take to ‘lell,’ and to go to ‘jall;’ or, after instances so pregnant, to agree with Professor von Kogalnitschan that ‘it is interesting to be able to study a Hindu dialect in the heart of Europe.’ Mr. Smith, however, being a philanthropist rather than a philologist, takes another view of the question. His anxiety is to see the Gipsies—and especially the Gipsy children—reclaimed. ‘A Gipsy,’ he reminds us, ‘lives, but one can scarcely tell how; they generally locate for a time near hen-roosts, potato-camps, turnip-fields, and game-preserves. They sell a few clothes-lines and clothes-pegs; but they Seldom use such things themselves. Washing would destroy their beauty . . . To have between three and four thousand men and women, and eight or ten thousand children, classed in the census as vagrants and vagabonds, roaming all over the country in ignorance and evil training, is not a pleasant look-out for the future; and I claim that if these poor children, living in vans and tents and under old carts, are to be allowed